Luke bet his mum Jay £10 he could read and review all the books in the Independent's list of 50 books for Y7 kids by Christmas. This is the blog of his progress

Thursday, 26 May 2011

A bit of philosophy

Jay Writes - As well as the reading challenge, Luke's been doing some other work with me over the past few weeks. We've been looking at ideas; talking a bit about philosophy, religion, and myths. Luke's making a stop motion animation version of Ragnarok, the Norse end-of-the-world story. Inspired by Derren Brown's show about faith healers, we talked about why someone might believe and what advantages being part of a religion brings - lots of critical thinking for our devout atheist to consider!

Inspired by the Doctor Who episode The Rebel Flesh, we got thinking about what defines a person. I asked Luke to write a bit about his view of this tricky philosophical questions. Here's his piece -

I define a person as anything that can think creatively and can adjust quickly to a situation. While this might not work in many situations, for example people in a coma or people with severe brain damage, it is the best solution that I have.

When humans say, "Look at all the people," or, "What kind of person are you?" they don't know just how big that statement is. But that is what philosophy is all about: asking the big questions.

But going back to what makes a person - I am afraid creativity and adjustment is the best I have to offer. If you have a much better definition please post it on my blog! But for now, what I really think is that "what makes a person?" is an unanswerable question

Luke's reading Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder a couple of chapters a day, now that he's got interested in philosophy. As he says, sometimes you need to ask the big questions!